Washington voters will be watched across the nation for the second time in three years: The Evergreen State faces a duel over gun laws on its November ballot.

The attention in 2012 was to Referendum 74, legalizing same-sex marriage.The 2014 focus will be on rival Initiatives 594 and 591: I-594 requires criminal background checks for those buying firearms at gun shows and on-line. I-591 would block any state gun regulation that has not been enacted nationally.

The pro-594 campaign kicked off Thursday with testaments of support from gun violence victims, clergy and a bipartisan team of prosecutors.

“The only people with anything to fear from a criminal background check are people with a criminal record,” said Snohomish County Prosecutor Mark Roe, a Democrat.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, cited the Wednesday night shooting death of a 17-year-old in White Center, and argued that the state’s laws on selling firearms to underage buyers, convicted felons, and those who have been involuntarily committed are easily evaded.

“Any law you enforce sometimes isn’t much of a law at all,” Satterberg said. ”We enforce it 60 percent of the time. As I remember from my high school report card, that is an ‘F’.”

It is possible to avoid requirements of the law “with a couple clicks of a mouse,” Satterberg said, adding to “the illegal stream of commerce” in guns. “We’re simply saying, ‘Let’s ask some questions’,” said the King County Prosecutor.

The state’s last “gun election” was in 1997, over an initiative to require trigger locks on stored firearms and to require that purchasers take a gun safety course.

The measure enjoyed a 65-35 percent lead in early polls, but a saturation campaign by the National Rifle Association sent it down to a thumping defeat. About the only active support came from an anti-violence campaign, Mothers Against Violence in America.

The I-594 campaign is far better equipped for political battle. It was initially spearheaded by Puget Sound-area faith leaders, who helped organize two mass marches in the aftermath of assassination of 20 first-graders at a Newtown, Connecticut, school.

Yes on 594 Campaign Manager Zack Silk spas as the campaign for Initiative 594 is officially launched at First United Methodist Church in Seattle. If passed by voters, the initiative will expand background checks to all gun sales. Photographed on Thursday, March 20, 2014. (Joshua Trujillo, seattlepi.com)

The pro-594 effort has since raised $1.5 million and shows up across the spectrum. I-594 has been endorsed by the state’s Catholic bishops. The campaign is being managed by Zach Silk, who ran the 2012 marriage equality effort. The Obama campaign’s successor group, Organizing for Action, has backed I-594.

The gun lobby will face the likes of Cheryl Stumbo, who seriously wounded in the 2006 Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle shooting that claimed one life.

Stumbo set a personal goal to collect 594 signatures on petitions putting I-594 on the ballot and kept going to eventually top 3,000. ”We are here because we have had enough,” she said Thursday, referring to the Legislature’s refusal to act on gun-safety measures.

Initiative 591 would block I-594. It would prohibit state government agencies from requiring background checks on firearms purchases unless a uniform national standard has been adopted.

“It requires us to wait on government,” said Silk. ”As we’ve seen in the last few years, we cannot count on Congress, but must do it ourselves.”

The opponents of I-594 are already using a familiar argument: The criminal background check initiative is designed to get a foot in the door.

“Washington gun owners are concerned that passage of I-594 paves the way for a massive government registry, the likes of which are already being used against gun owners in California and New York, where a generation ago, gun control proponents scoffed at gun owner concerns about registration, calling those concerns paranoid,” Dave Workman wrote recently in GUNMAG, a publication of the Second Amendment Foundation.

Roe, from Snohomish County, said he keeps firearms in the house — “I’m a gun guy, I own guns” — and that an intruder might get to see one some day. Still, he decried the ease with which guns can be purchased. “Why do we make it easy for people to steal a life?” he asked.

The National Rifle Association testified against I-594 in the Legislature, but has yet to signal the extent it will get involved in the initiative battle.

A group formed by New York’s then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Mayors Against Gun Violence, has given $30,000 to the pro-594 campaign.

I-594 starts off with a healthy lead in the polls, even in conservative parts of the state east of the “Cascade Curtain.”

“Criminal background checks on gun purchases are even more popular than the Seattle Seahawks,” said the Rev. Sandy Brown, pastor of Seattle First United Methodist Church, who once had a pulpit in Wenatchee.

The optimism of spring might not hold through the slugfest of the fall campaign.